Nazi era

The Nazi era is presented less as a fully narrated setting than as the political future that overtakes the book’s late-1920s Berlin. Historical notes place the entertainment and political life of 1928 beside the later suppression of cultural figures and the end of the New Objectivity, making the period’s ordinary pleasures and unsettled politics part of a history moving toward authoritarian rule.

Political Development and Public Culture

The notes mark the limited electoral strength of the National Socialist German Workers' Party in Berlin’s May 1928 city elections: it won 1.5 percent of the vote. That result is set alongside the party’s efforts to establish a press presence. Otto and Gregor Strasser founded the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, identified in the notes as the first National Socialist newspaper. The juxtaposition records both the movement’s small electoral share at that moment and its work to build a public voice.

The book’s scenes of Berlin’s mass culture supply a contemporary social landscape rather than a simple explanation of the later regime. In a cinema, men crowd into a room where a Wurlitzer accompanies a film and the audience laughs together; elsewhere, the narrative passes through a popular amusement venue in Hasenheide and depicts its band and festivities. A coffee-shop scene similarly makes public entertainment out of a flirtatious performance and a story told at the table. These episodes present amusement as collective, commercial, and repetitive, while the historical notes place that everyday world beside the political developments that followed.

Cultural Rupture

The notes connect the era’s political change to the fate of Claire Waldoff, the celebrated Berlin cabaret singer. Her career, they state, was destroyed by the National Socialist government because of her sexual orientation and risqué innuendo. The account thus makes the end of a performer’s public career a concrete instance of the regime’s consequences for cultural life; it does not treat the transition as merely a change in artistic fashion.

The New Objectivity is described as an artistic movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s in opposition to Expressionism. Its end in 1933 is linked directly to the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power. A note on the 1928 foxtrot Es liegt in der Luft draws on the word Sachlichkeit, associated with the movement’s name, to place an artistic vocabulary within popular music. The historical account therefore links cultural change to both mass entertainment and the political break of 1933.

Songs, Political Memory, and Violence

The notes also trace the political afterlife of the Horst-Wessel-Lied. Written in 1927 by Horst Wessel, a Berlin commander of the Sturmabteilung (SA), it became the Nazi Party’s anthem from 1930 to 1945. Wessel was murdered in 1930 by Albrecht Höhler, identified as a Communist Party member. These details place the song within a sequence of political conflict and later official use: its composition preceded Wessel’s death, while its adoption as an anthem extended through the Nazi era.

Taken together, the references distinguish the pre-regime city from the period that followed without presenting 1928 as already identical to it. Elections, newspapers, cabaret, cinema, popular songs, and artistic movements form the documented points of contact. The era’s significance lies in the contrast between that varied public culture and its later political subjection, with 1933 serving as the decisive break in the notes’ account.